§ 10
Christmas was celebrated at Conster in the manner peculiar to houses where there is no religion and no child. Tradition compelled the various members of the family to give each other presents which they did not want and to eat more food than was good for them; it also compelled them to pack unwillingly into the Wolsey car and drive to Leasan church, where they listened in quite comprehensible boredom to a sermon by brother George. Peter was able to break free from this last superstition, and took himself off to the office at Starvecrow—his family’s vague feeling of unrest at his defection being compensated by the thought that there really wouldn’t have been room for him in the car.
But Starvecrow was dim and sodden on this green Christmas day, full of a muggy cloud drifting up from the Tillingham, and Peter was still sore from the amenities of the Christmas breakfast table—that ghastly effort to be festive because it was Christmas morning, that farce of exchanging presents—all those empty rites of a lost childhood and a lost faith. He hated Christmas.
Also he wanted Stella, and she was not to be had. She too had gone to church—which he would not have minded, if she had not had the alternative of being with him here at Starvecrow. He did not at all object to religion in women as long as they kept it in its proper place. But Stella did not keep hers in its proper place—she let it interfere with her daily life—with his ... and she had not gone to church at Leasan, which was sanctified to Peter by the family patronage and the family vault, but to Vinehall, where they did not even have the decencies of Dearly Beloved Brethren, but embarrassing mysteries which he felt instinctively to be childish and in bad taste.
In Stella’s home this Christmas there would be both religion and children, the latter being represented by her father and herself. Last night when he called at Hollingrove—Dr. Mount’s cottage on the road between Leasan and Vinehall—to ask her to meet him here today at Starvecrow, he had found her decorating a Christmas tree, to be put in the church, of all places. She had asked him to stop and go with her and her father to the Midnight Mass—“Do come, Peter—we’re going to make such a lovely noise at the Gloria in Excelsis. Father Luce has given the boys trays to bang this year.” But Peter had declined, partly because he disapproved of tray-banging as a means of giving glory to God, but mostly because he was hurt that Stella should prefer going to church to being with him at Starvecrow.
She had made a grave mistake, if only she’d known it—leaving him here by himself today, with his time free to think about her, and memories of her dark side still fresh in his mind. For Stella had her dark side, like the moon, though generally you saw as little of it as the moon’s. In nearly all ways she was Peter’s satisfaction. He loved her with body and mind, indeed with a sort of spiritual yearning. He loved her for her beauty, her sense, her warmth, her affectionate disposition which expressed itself naturally in love, her freedom from affectation, and also from any pretensions to wit or cleverness, and other things which he distrusted. But for two things he loved her not—her religion and her attitude towards his family.
Hitherto neither had troubled him much. Their meetings had been so few that they had had but little talk of anything save love. He had merely realised that though she held the country round Vinehall and Leasan as dear as even his idolatry demanded she was very little impressed with the importance of the family to whom that country belonged. But up in London that had scarcely mattered. He had also realised that Stella, as she put it, “tried to be good.” At first he had thought her wanton—her ready reception of his advances, her ardent affection, her unguarded manner, had made him think she was like the many young women filling London in those years, escaped from quiet homes into a new atmosphere of freedom and amorousness, making the most of what might be short-lived opportunities. But he was glad when he discovered his mistake. Peter approved of virtue in women, though he had occasionally taken advantage of its absence. He certainly would never have married a woman who was not virtuous, and he soon discovered that he wanted to marry Stella.
But in those days everything flowed like a stream—nothing was firm, nothing stood still. Things were different now—they could flow no longer, they must be established; it was now that Peter realised how much greater these two drawbacks were than they had seemed at first. Stella’s religion did not consist merely in preserving his treasure whole till he was ready to claim it, but in queer ways of denial and squander, exacting laws, embarrassing consecrations. And her attitude towards the family gave him almost a feeling of insult—she was so casual, so unaware ... she did not seem to trouble herself with its requirements and prohibitions. She did not seem to realise that the House of Alard was the biggest thing on earth—so big that it could crush her and Peter, their hope and romance, into dust. But she would soon find out what it was—whether they married or not, she would find out.
Sometimes—for instance, today—he was almost savagely glad when he thought how sure she was to find out. Sometimes he was angry with her for her attitude towards the family, and for all that she took for granted in his. He knew that she expected him to marry her whatever happened—with a naïvety which occasionally charmed but more often irritated him. She imagined that if his father refused to let them live at Starvecrow, he would take her and live with her in some cottage on five hundred a year ... and watch the place go to ruin without him. She would be sorry not to have Starvecrow, but she would not care about anything else—she would not fret in the least about the estate or the outraged feelings of those who looked to him to help them. She would not even have cared if his father had had it in his power—which he had not—to prevent her ever becoming Lady Alard. Stella did not care two pins about being Lady Alard—all she wanted was to be Mrs. Peter. He had loved her for her disinterestedness, but now he realised that it had its drawbacks. He saw that his choice had fallen on a woman who was not a good choice for Alard—not merely because she had no money, but because she had no pride. He could not picture her at Conster—lady of the Manor. He could picture her at Starvecrow, but not at Conster.
... He bowed his head upon the table—it felt heavy with his thought. Stella was the sweetest, loveliest thing in life, and sometimes he felt that her winning was worth any sacrifice, and that he would pay her price not only with his own renunciation but with all the hopes of his house. But some unmovable, fundamental part of him showed her to him as an infatuation, a witch-light, leading him away from the just claims of his people and his land, urging him to a cruel betrayal of those who trusted to him for rescue.
After all, he had known her only a year. In a sense, of course, he had known her from her childhood, when she had first come with her father to Vinehall, but he had not loved her till he had met her in London a year ago. Only a year.... To Peter’s conservative soul a year was nothing. For nearly two hundred years the Alards had owned Starvecrow—and they had been at Conster for three hundred more. Was he going to sacrifice those century-old associations for the passion of a short year? He had loved her only a year, and these places he had loved all his life—and not his life only, but the lives of those who had come before him, forefathers whose spirit lived in him, with love for the land which was his and theirs.